


Shudder

by suzvoy



Category: Smallville
Genre: Angst, First Time, Futurefic, M/M, hurt-comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-09-06
Updated: 2004-09-06
Packaged: 2017-11-01 07:32:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/353793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suzvoy/pseuds/suzvoy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It seems fitting that his first visit to the penthouse should start like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shudder

## Shudder

by Suz

<http://sjhw.net/suzvoy/svfic.html>

* * *

It's about power. 

Its movement, the flow: the way it shifts from one place to another - because power never goes away. Doesn't simply leave. 

It goes somewhere else. 

It's a different kind of power that sends him hurtling through the balcony window, unfeeling of the glass that he knows must be there. It seems fitting that his first visit to the penthouse should start like this. 

Lying on the plush carpeted floor, unable to move. He's the strongest man in the world and he can't _move_. He sobs instead, feeling the glass now. Digging into his cheek, pressing against it hard, praying that maybe this time it will actually pierce his skin. 

"Clark?" 

Nothing surprises Lex. Not former best friends declaring their friendship over; not former best friends crying on the floor of his home. 

"Jesus, Clark, what happened?" 

Hands on his body, feeling, turning him over, and he goes where they tell him. It's something that doesn't require thought. 

"Are you hurt? Clark, are you _hurt_?" And he knows Lex must be seeing the blood on his shirt, arms, hands... 

"No." He manages to force out but God, he wishes he couldn't. He shouldn't be capable of even that. It's too much like being normal. "Not mine." 

The hands don't even pause, moving to hook beneath his shoulders. "We need to get you cleaned up." 

"No." Lex doesn't understand. Lex actually doesn't understand and had it been any other night his belief in the universe would have shifted. He'd deliberately come to the _one_ person who could do what he needed. "You have kryptonite, Lex. I _know_ you have kryptonite." 

Lex's voice brooks no argument. "The shower, Clark." 

"Lex..." _Please_. 

"I'm not letting you fucking kill yourself, Kent. You don't get off that easy. Either you come with me to the bathroom or I find out exactly what you've done and let your parents know." 

Oh God. No, no. Fresh pain blooms through his chest and it's enough to make him move. Anything but _that_. 

There are voices as he walks with an arm around his back; voices that he realises have been there for some time. He doesn't care who they are. Lex gets rid of them somehow and then it doesn't matter anymore because they're in the bathroom, the bright light unfamiliar to his unadjusted eyes. 

He stands by the shower alone, locked knees the only thing keeping him upright as Lex turns the water on, checking the heat. 

Not that it matters. Not that it ever did. 

"Clothes, Clark." 

Clothes. Clothes come off when you have a shower, but when he grabs the bottom of his shirt he _feels_ it, and nausea grabs him at the idea of pulling _that_ over his head. Across his face. 

Ripping the shirt off instead, hearing the blood-soaked splat as it lands on the tiled floor and he starts crying again, hasn't really stopped as he fumbles with the zipper on his pants. 

Pants instead of jeans. Grown up instead of unpopular school kid. 25 instead of 15; 15 when he first knew Lex and he wants to be 15 forever. He was 16 the first time this happened but even then...even then... 

It'd never been like this. 

Clothes all gone, somehow, and then he's being pushed into the shower. Bracing his hands against the wall, head bowed, watching the water swirling away turning red. Feeling sick again, pushing away from the wall and turning to see that the shower door is still open and Lex is... 

Lex is holding his clothes, examining them, emptying pockets. "Lex?" Anyone else would have trouble seeing through the water, listening to Lex's reply, but not him. He _hates_ the things he can do. 

Lex's head doesn't even lift up. "Have to make sure that you don't have it anymore, Clark. I doubt it, but...I have to be certain. Luthor's always cover every angle." 

Clark moves forward, face out of the water so his words won't be obscured and says the only thing he's sure of. "If I still had it you'd be dead already." It's the only time he's felt any strength at all since arriving. He only hates himself more. 

The clothes splat to the floor again, and Lex leans forward to put his hands into the water of the shower, cleaning his skin. His pyjama bottoms - all he'd been wearing in bed - are quickly soaked to the skin. Leaning further inside he turns off the water and then there's a towel from somewhere - huge, fresh against Clark's skin (so _wrong_ ) - and when Lex starts drying him off something kicks in. 

"I can do it." 

Lex pauses then nods. Lets go of the towel, obviously pleased. "Good." 

Clark concentrates on getting dry, rubbing the towel over his skin. Stark white contrasting against tanned flesh and when he's almost dry Lex speaks again. 

"You have to tell me, Clark. I have to know or I can't help you." 

It's power, again. This will come with a price - Clark _knows_ it will come with a price. If he does this, the most powerful man in the world will forever be under the control of the man who's been nothing but a stranger for the last eight years. 

He understands that. Fears it. 

Thinks he might like it. 

And finally acknowledges the fact that he'd never told Lex he was Superman. 

* 

A bed against his back, sheet over his skin; Lex Luthor lying next to him. 

Clark stares at the ceiling, a shaft of light playing there, a breeze coming through the broken window. It's still warm this time of year. 

"She had a necklace." All this because of a necklace. A fucking _necklace_. "She got some kryptonite from...somewhere." He hadn't had time to ask before things...changed. "Was raving about how she'd had it analysed, how it wasn't the green stuff and it had to mean something to Superman. I didn't know she had it. I didn't know she'd had it so long until she told me." Lois had always jealously guarded every piece of information she found on Superman. It was the one area where they weren't full partners. "Until she...showed me." 

Holding it closer, right in his _face_ ; he'd felt it working already and even as he'd tried to pull away his hand had reached up to yank the necklace out of her grasp. He'd put it on, closing his eyes as the kryptonite came into contact with his skin. She'd snorted and called him a girl. 

That was when he broke her arm. 

It'd never been instantaneous aggression before. At first the red kryptonite seemed to get rid of his inhibitions, but the longer he wore it the more...violent...he became. 

Not this time. An instant need to make her _suffer_ because she wouldn't leave him the fuck alone; enjoyed doing it all as Clark Kent, the guy everybody knew wouldn't even step on a fucking cockroach. 

"Lois?" Lex asks, maybe confirming who Clark is talking about. Maybe confirming something else. 

"In her apartment." He thinks he'd like to go someplace nice, and never come back. "She's not breathing." 

Gasping, broken, clutching uselessly at his hand as she'd stared up at him. "You're..." It'd been all she could get out, but he'd laughed, enjoying the irony that she'd finally stopped being an idiot just before she died. 

And then she'd proven it. Stopped trying to free herself and in a move that in his arrogance he hadn't seen coming, she'd ripped the necklace off from around his neck. 

Clark remembers it, the horrified yell as her body slumped to the floor. Bursting out through the window, mind screaming but realising where he needed to go. 

He's not crying anymore. 

* 

Opening his eyes, Clark's suprised to realise that he fell asleep. He's even more surprised to see Lex standing at the foot of the bed, fully dressed. He looks how he always does in the business section of the Planet. 

"Superman's taking his own version of a leave of absence," Lex declares, "to deal with the terrible loss of his close friend, Lois Lane. Apparently she was unfortunate enough to stumble across two drug addicts trying to burgle her apartment last night." 

Clark should thank him. 

He closes his eyes and goes back to sleep. 

* 

He barely leaves the bed. Almost all of his days and nights are spent there. The window is fixed, Lex comes and goes, and Clark just lays there. Sometimes varying his position but mostly on his back. 

Lex leaves him alone for two weeks before the Tuesday morning he sits on the edge of the bed and starts talking. It's longer than Clark expected. 

"You need to start going out again, Clark." 

Clark knows what he means. "How can I? After what I did, how can I _possibly_ go out there as him?" 

"For that very same reason." Lex argues. "To stop someone else from doing exactly the same thing." 

Swallowing, Clark licks his lips. His eyes are burning. They haven't done that for a while. "I don't think I-" 

"Do you know why I have the green kryptonite, Clark?" 

He honestly doesn't know how to respond. He's never questioned the why of it before. "Because you're _Lex_?" 

Lex's voice is very, very calm. "It was never to kill you. It was so I could stop you, if this ever happened. So I could help you go back to what you were before. You're the most powerful being on Earth, Clark. Kryptonite's your only weakness. Luthor's have to cover every angle, remember?" 

Lex is the only Luthor left. 

He's finding it a little easier to breathe. "I can't go back to the Planet." Seeing them...the sympathy...no. Just. _No_. 

"Understandable." Lex nods. "You can work for me." 

Clark had known Lex would state his requirements eventually. This was expected. "Okay." 

"And take a shower. You need one." 

He does. 

* 

Superman becomes much like he was in the public eye. People are happy to see him again; newspapers exclaim their joy in thick large-type font. Clark smiles by day and lies expressionless by night. 

He lets Lex fuck him. Clark's never been with a guy before and it's better than he expected. Lex clearly knows what he's doing but despite his attempts at persuasion Clark refuses to fuck him back. He can't risk hurting anyone else. 

Where everything else is concerned, Lex tells him to do things and Clark complies. He calls his parents when Lex tells him to, and he's far better at lying over the phone than he ever has been in person. 

He sends an official letter of resignation to Perry, detailing that he obviously won't be working his notice period. 

His work for Lex turns out to utilise a lot of his journalistic skills. It's mostly tracking people down, tracing their histories. Determining if they're someone Lex can deal with and trust. 

He's yet to find any evidence that Lex is doing something illegal. Either he's hiding it somewhere else or... 

He'd been wrong. He and Lois and half the god damned city had been wrong. 

It doesn't seem likely. 

* 

Sometimes, on those hellish days where there are two emergencies at the same time he'll ask Lex which one he should help with first. Lex is fast - he always has an immediate answer for why one should take priority over the other. 

Until one day Lex says he doesn't know. That Clark will have to figure it out for himself. 

They stop fucking. When they are in bed together there's still a lot of groping, and a _lot_ of kissing. Sometimes Lex sucks him off; sometimes gives him a handjob but that's as far as it goes. 

Clark lies in bed next to him after one such night, confusion and the compulsion to know what to _do_ running through his head. "Lex," his voice is quiet; they don't often talk at night, "tell me what to do." 

"No." Lex says immediately, shifting to look at him. " _You_ tell _me_ what to do." 

Clark knows he's being tested when that hard gaze doesn't move away, when Lex just keeps _looking_ at him as if he's the one with the x-ray vision. "I..." He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know _what to do_ , and an almost unimaginable terror grabs him. 

"Clark?" 

Something in that voice, that face, and Clark is pushing Lex onto his back, straddling his body as he leans down for a kiss that's probably the first one he's seriously participated in since he came here. 

He can feel the power shifting again from Lex to him or from him to Lex, or maybe it'd never changed in the first place. Maybe he'd just been unaware of it. 

It won't be right, things will never be right but as he breaks from the kiss with a shaky breath and rests his forehead against Lex's, he thinks that maybe, _maybe_ he can do _this_. 

"Let me fuck you." 

**~FINIS**


End file.
